Chapter Thirty Four.
Left to Die.
The glooming shadows of night crept on apace.
Renshaw, lying there in the wild rocky defile, felt the poison stealing insidiously through his veins in a kind of slow drowsy stupor. He knew that he was doomed; he realised that even if the wild Korannas did not speedily come up and put an end to his sufferings yet his hour had come. The poison was too deadly for antidote, and he had no antidote.
In his stupor he hardly heard the receding hoof-strokes of his companion—his companion for whose life he had given his own, and who now rode away leaving him alone in that remote and savage solitude to die.
He lay there as he had sunk down. The night grew pitchy black between those grim, frowning walls of cliff. The faint stir of a cool breeze played in fitful puffs about his pallid brow already cold and moist with the dews of approaching death. The stars flashed from the vault above in a narrow riband of gold between the loom of the great cliffs against the sky. The melancholy howl of some prowling beast rose now and again upon the night.
There was a patter, patter of stealthy feet among the stones—a gleam of scintillating green from ravening eyes. Nearer, nearer came the pit-pat of those soft footfalls. The wild creatures of the waste had scented their prey.
Man—the lord of the beasts of creation. Man—before whose erect form the four-footed carnivora of the desert fled in terror—what was he now—how was he represented here? A mere thing of flesh and blood, an abject thing—prostrate, helpless, dying. An easy prey. The positions were reversed.
The gleam of those hungry eyes—the baring of gaunt jaws, the lolling tongues—were as things unknown to the stricken adventurer. The shrill yelp, echoing from the great krantzes, calling upon more to come to the feast—the snapping snarl, as hungry rivals drew too near each other—all passed unnoticed. Nearer, nearer they came, a ravening circle. For they knew that the prey was sure.
What a contrast! This man, with the cool, dauntless brain—the hardened frame so splendidly proportioned, lay there in the pitchy blackness at the mercy of the skulking, cowardly scavengers of those grim mountain solitudes. And what had wrought this strange, this startling contrast? Only a mere tiny puncture, scarcely bigger than a pin prick.